Yes, it's amazing. A book this long, and there are still some things that it didn't cover. The footnotes contain additional helpful information.

The purpose of this section is not to teach you about the things listed here, but merely to provide a list. You'll need to go to
Programming Perl
, the
perl
(1) or
perlfaq
(1) manpages, the HTML documents in CPAN's
doc
directory, or the Usenet newsgroups to get further information.

Yes, Perl can do networking. Beyond the TCP/IP stream sockets discussed in
Appendix C,
Networking Clients
, if your system is up to it, Perl also supports UNIX-domain sockets, UDP-based message passing, shared memory, semaphores, named and anonymous pipes, and signal handling. See
Chapter 6
of
Programming Perl
or the
perlipc
(1) manpage for standard modules, and the networking section of the CPAN modules directory for third-party modules.

Yes, Perl can do TCP/IP socket networking, UNIX-domain networking, and shared memory and semaphores on systems that support it. See the
perlipc
(1) manpage for further information.